AZ-304 Azure Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What does the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) represent in a disaster recovery plan?
- The maximum amount of data loss measured in time
- The maximum acceptable time to restore a service after a disaster (Correct answer)
- The replication frequency between primary and secondary regions
- The scheduled backup interval
Correct answer: The maximum acceptable time to restore a service after a disaster
RTO defines the maximum tolerable duration of downtime — the amount of time within which a service must be restored to avoid unacceptable business impact.
Question 2: Which Azure service is used to orchestrate the replication and failover of Azure VMs to a secondary region for disaster recovery?
- Azure Backup
- Azure Site Recovery (Correct answer)
- Azure Traffic Manager
- Azure Migrate
Correct answer: Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) continuously replicates Azure VMs to a secondary region and enables orchestrated failover with recovery plans, minimizing RTO and RPO.
Question 3: A company requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of near zero for a mission-critical Azure SQL Database. Which feature should be used?
- Long-Term Retention backups
- Active Geo-Replication (Correct answer)
- Point-in-Time Restore
- Auto-failover groups with grace period
Correct answer: Active Geo-Replication
Active Geo-Replication synchronously replicates transactions to up to four secondary replicas in real time, achieving near-zero RPO for Azure SQL Database.
Question 4: Which Azure SQL Database feature provides automatic failover with a configurable grace period and maintains read/write DNS endpoints that automatically redirect after failover?
- Active Geo-Replication
- Auto-Failover Groups (Correct answer)
- Elastic Jobs
- Long-Term Retention
Correct answer: Auto-Failover Groups
Auto-Failover Groups provide a single connection endpoint that automatically redirects to the secondary after failover, enabling application connectivity without DNS changes.
Question 5: Which Azure Backup feature allows you to retain database backups for up to 10 years to meet long-term compliance requirements?
- Point-in-Time Restore
- Long-Term Retention (LTR) (Correct answer)
- Geo-Redundant Backup
- Soft Delete
Correct answer: Long-Term Retention (LTR)
Long-Term Retention (LTR) for Azure SQL Database stores full backups in geo-redundant storage for up to 10 years, supporting compliance and auditing requirements.
Question 6: An architect is designing a disaster recovery solution where the secondary site must be ready to take over within minutes with minimal infrastructure cost. Which DR pattern should be chosen?
- Cold Standby
- Warm Standby (pilot light) (Correct answer)
- Hot Standby (active-active)
- Backup and Restore
Correct answer: Warm Standby (pilot light)
Warm standby (pilot light) keeps minimal core infrastructure running in the secondary region, reducing cost while enabling faster recovery than cold standby by pre-deploying key components.
AZ-304 Azure Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery 1
What does the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) represent in a disaster recovery plan?